No Place for the Dissident Reviews

While I am recommending this, I would highly suggest you wait for a sale or until the price lowers. It’s not a bad game and has some cool mechanics, but it isn’t something that’s worth $20 unless you really think It’ll scratch a niche you have. While sometimes fun, it needs more polish to be worth the price it’s asking for, at least in my opinion. Here’s a bullet point review: The Good: - Ideology spreads through points on the map that interact with each other instead of having each country just be a tap made up of abstract numbers. They even have different population densities. Looking at waves of orange overflow a country is somewhat neat to look at. - Actions have a variety of different effects that are noticeable on the map and visualized on the country tab. Though some don’t quite make sense in some contexts, such as being able to organize protests and run social media memes in North Korea. - The world can sometimes turn into a cold war situation with roughly evenly split between two opposing ideologies on the brink of WW3. Game that end up like this tend to be the most interesting and fun, at least to me. - Can peacefully take over the world if you want to. My first run on normal had 0 deaths and my last one on hard had only 15 thousand due to a few minor civil wars. - It looks like the developer is trying to update the game every few weeks, even if in only minor ways. I am hopeful that they will be able to continue this trend and improve the game. The Neutral: - Some amount of strategizing and resource management is needed to prevent your ideology from stagnating and collapsing to opposition, even in supposedly safe countries. Unless you completely wipe out the opposition in a country they will be a thorn in your side. This can be interesting or annoying depending on what type of game you want this to be. - The only thing differentiating ideologies is their name and how radical they are. While not necessary, it would have been neat to have some politics that would change how you play. For example, countries with a nationalist like ideology would have more military power, but the opposition ideology would be able to expand faster to offset this. But depth like that just isn’t in here. - The game has 1 vs 1 online multiplayer, but I’m unable to comment on how good it is as I haven’t tried it with anyone. The Bad: - The most effective way of wining (expand to as many major nations before they fall to the opposition) will become tedious after a few games. - There are 175 countries on the world map, micromanaging each one your trying to hold or expand into gets old real fast. As of this review there is an experimental tool that lets you group counties, but I haven’t been able to figure out how use it properly. - Wars are not very interesting and mostly boils down to who happens to have the bigger population. A major military power invading a small African nation with a small army can lose hundreds of thousands of their population each month. - Establishing a foothold in a country with 100% opposition is nearly impossible, and when it does happen it’s not clear what causes it. The Ugly: -The game has crashed on me at least once in my 12-hour play time, so don’t expect this to be perfectly stable. Dev needs to fix these problems as soon as possible. Overall: Chocolateism/10

So short run so far, I stopped so I could get a refund. So far the game play, was, hit pause, click on the book icon. Unpause. Pause, click on the book icon and the loud speaker icon. Unpause. As your ideology expands, pause click on the book icon and the speaker icon for each country, Clicking on infulence public media as well and the next icon along if there is resistance in the area. Winning strategy, I had most of the world under my sway, Quite a few nations fanatically supporting me. But pause, click click click? It's just far too mindless, promises complexity that does not seem to exist. I'ld be mildy miffed if it was a free flash game,

Decent game, great looking map as well. I do think though that adding in cold war like mechanics into the game could improve it. overall 6/10

pretty nice but a bit pricey for the amount of replaying you can get dont buy im not gonna sugar coat it i have played this game 2 times ive had it for over a year DONT BUY

I found it dull. I didn't get to flavor my ideology and control it enough. There wasn't any research involved. Ideologies are not... just mind-viruses, they actually motivate people and economies in how they develop. That may be... useless window dressing, or even... unwanted apologia, given the theming of this game. Yet I can't enjoy a game such as this without them. Perhaps it's because I'm less than thrilled to play the villain. To be someone causing nations to grow extreme and miserable, biased in all their viewpoints, stuck in endless conflicts... rotten. No fun.

This is literally Plague Inc. reskinned to look like DEFCON, which half the gameplay and an inverted amount of polish. There's no reason to actually play this, and you can go to the discussions page to see that the developer doesn't care and thinks the game is already perfect. I find the notion that he thinks this is an acceptable political game to be insulting. As an example of how shallow this is, the only thing you define about the ideology you're spreading is the name. That's it. Nothing else. This game doesn't even have a menu screen. This isn't even an alpha build. This isn't even a tech demo. This is barely a 2008 flash game. This isn't even worth playing if it was free.

The gameplay is promising, but the game itself is a direct rip of Plague Inc for how the interface works. For this game though, that interface doesn't match, nor work well. Not including there are massive grammar, spelling, and basic English mistakes that makes the tool tips hard to understand as if written by a "Prince of Nigeria" email translator. This seems like it would be better tailored as a maniacal evil genius interface, or demonic or something to actually sell the idea. Like you chose news stories to run by selecting propaganda options. Or, that you react to the "others" by promoting your own ideology that forwards progress and human survival like most real socialist regimes do, subverting them with propaganda. Like I said, it's got a good premise, but the execution is horrible.

This is a cheap knock-off of Plague, Inc. It's not clear what the mechanics do (especially censorship), how the final score is reached, etc. Not ready for prime time.

It's okay. It will be better if they add more features and streamline the actions for smaller countries. Otherwise it will remain more tedious than fun. It could be really cool if they keep updating it.

I definitely want to love it for its concept. Political sims tend to be more geopolitical ([i]Victoria[/i] series) or electoral ([i]Democracy[/i] series), and I've long wanted something more granular following the advancement of an ideology through populations, like the outbreak sims this project is inspired by. However, it seems only partly realized. In my opinion, the problem is best summarized as a lack of identity for the player's ideology and its opposition. As it is, your ideology is only a name, and your opposition is simulated as a single unified force, similar to the "cure" effort in [i]Plague Inc.[/i] You never have any reason to feel like you're up against anything in particular, and I think that would go a long way to offering different challenges and adding a lot of flavor to your [strike]conquest[/strike] liberation of the world. I think both these problems could be approached by adding a step of ideology creation where principles are selected. Selecting something like "Free Expression" might limit or penalize censorship actions and characterize the opposition as censorial, while a principle like "Piety" might and characterize the opposition as unbelieving heretics. I'm of the mind that this could give the simulation, with some work, something to respond to in terms of what unique problems might arise, what flavor text might be delivered, and maybe even which parts of the world might be more or less receptive to your ideology. It would begin to occupy a space between outbreak sim and grand strategy, which is basically what I feel like this game's potential is or was. I [b]would[/b] recommend it to anyone who's just really into the concept like I am, and willing to treat it as an early access title with good potential. But otherwise I have to honestly say it's [b]not[/b] what you probably want it to be from reading the description.